Education Innovation

Paul Abbott
Academic Director
Wolfram Summer School
abbott@wolfram.com

(RowDefault[, (Spacer1), , (Spacer1), ])  #WolframTechConf

Abstract

For the last 7 years the Wolfram Summer School has included an Educational Innovation track.

I will give a brief overview of the Wolfram Summer School and highlight some  EDUCATION  presentations published on the Wolfram Community.

And, I hope, convince you to attend the Wolfram Summer School!

Introduction

The School is an excellent place at which to develop and implement educational innovation:

Extensive high-quality mentoring from international experts and Wolfram Research developers, sharing their experience in making educational technologies

Stephen Wolfram is an active participant and provides general guidance to—and review of—all projects

Quality feedback from—and interaction with—other like-minded educators

Intensive hands-on 3-4 week format including in-depth training on Wolfram Language technology development

Lectures and discussions on computational thinking and current strategies

Goal and Focus

Goal is to quickly develop education tools using Wolfram technologies

Focus of projects is to change the way people learn and teach—for example, creating tools for students to use or management platforms for teachers

School Format

How is the School run?

In 2020 and 2021 the Wolfram Summer School was fully virtual

In 2022 it used a hybrid format, and was held in Champaign, IL

In 2023, the Wolfram Summer School will return to Bentley University (Waltham, MA), scheduled to run from June 25 to July 15

School Outcomes

So what do you do at the School?

Student Output

Writing a computational essay

Creating a repository submission: Function Repository, Paclet Repository, Notebook Archive, Neural Net Repository, Data Repository.

Writing a microblog on your project published on Wolfram Community

Tumblr

A quick overview of outputs from all tracks is on Tumblr

Wolfram Community

All presentations—now as interactive Notebooks—are published on the Wolfram Community

Wolfram Technology Conference

Check out the conference sessions with the  EDUCATION  tag

Useful Resources

Developing courses from scratch is time-consuming

Avoid re-invention

Take advantage of the huge range of resources:

Embed demonstrations directly into your lecture Notebook

Computational Thinking Initiatives ⊳ https://www.computationinitiative.org/

Wolfram|Alpha ⊳ http://wolframalpha.com/

MathWorld ⊳ http://mathworld.wolfram.com/

Learning Resources

The Wolfram Language: Fast Introduction for Programmers

Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language

Wolfram Documentation Center

Wolfram Challenges

Wolfram Programming Lab

Wolfram Screencast and Video Gallery

Wolfram U

2018 Wolfram Summer School Lectures (+ some other years)

Repositories

Wolfram Language Code Gallery

Wolfram Demonstrations Project

Wolfram Data Repository

Wolfram Neural Net Repository

Wolfram Function Repository

Wolfram Language Paclet Repository

Wolfram Foundation Notebook Archive

Wolfram Community and News

Wolfram Community

Wolfram Community - Staff Picks

Wolfram Blog

More resources

Student Experience

Mads Bahrami (WSS 2017)

Mads is now the director of Educational Programs and Outreach Manager at Wolfram Research:

Why you enjoyed the School

Going to to dorm life-style, spending days and night on research and developing something new; like good old days, not too old though ;)

Meeting an international community of WL coders.

Why you think others would too

For improving their coding skills (my main motivation when I applied for WSS as a student).

What you got out of it

It opened a new door/horizon in my life; changing my view about what I want to do for my future.

John McNally (WSS 2022)

John, who is the host for this session attended the 2022 Wolfram Summer School.

So I've asked John—who now works for Wolfram Research—to speak about his experience.

For Discussion

There are, of course, many obstacles:

True innovation is hard!

Cost

Infrastructure

Within an educational institution, one needs support to implement innovation

Convincing others that your idea is a good one is not always easy

Arranging for immersive use of technology in lectures, lab classes and, particularly, exams can be difficult

How should one best implement Computational Thinking in education?